Thomas Fulton (Thomas Chandler) - The Book of Books: Biblical Interpretation, Literary Culture, and the Political Imagination from Erasmus to Milton

THE BOOK OF BOOKS

THE
BOOK OF BOOKS

Biblical Interpretation, Literary Culture, and the Political Imagination from Erasmus to Milton

Thomas Fulton

Published in Cooperation with Folger Shakespeare Library

Copyright 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10987654321

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8122-5266-8

For my parents

CONTENTS

A NOTE ON TEXTS

I have struggled with whether to modernize texts or leave them in the original. Except for the titles of early books cited in the notes and bibliography and passages quoted in the notes, I have chosen to modernize spelling and (very occasionally) punctuation throughout the text. I have generally preserved the original irregularities of capitalization. When humanistic study seems under siege, there remain few compelling reasons to exclude nonspecialists or international readers, especially with the difficulties of early Tudor orthography. It also seems inconsistent to surround modernized texts such as Shakespeares with the erratic spelling of his contemporaries. The one exception is Edmund Spenser, because modern editions of Spenser are left in original spelling, and because it seemed too big a task in a monograph with a broad scope to question that well-defended scholarly tradition. In some cases, where the original spelling of the word represents a somewhat diffferent or particularly expressive wordas when Henry VIII articulates his scruples over scripture as a scripulositieI have included the original with the transcription.

Introduction

After the Bible was Translated into English, every Man, nay every Boy and Wench that could read English, thought they spoke with God Almighty and understood what he said, when by a certain number of Chapters a day they had read the Scriptures once or twice over, the Reverence and Obedience due to the Reformed Church here, and to the Bishops and Pastors therein, was cast off, and every Man became the Judge of Religion, and the Interpreter of Scriptures to himself.

Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth: The History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England (written ca. 1668)

Many years ago, in an effort to recover the experience of early modern readers, I began the seemingly simple task of reading their Bibles. What started as exploratory and haphazard became more and more systematic as I sought to understand the Geneva version, an annotated Bible created by Protestant exiles during the reign of Queen Mary. This was the Bible used by major figures and theologians of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, as well as a huge swath of its reading populationit was the Bible of Queen Elizabeth, Aemilia Lanyer, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Richard Hooker, John Whitgift, and the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, among many others.text, and how it shaped their access to others. Studying the popular Geneva text and its notes closelyand reading it comparatively with other Renaissance Biblesseemed a first step (however belated) in understanding the interpretive habits and reading practices of early modern Britain.

The exercise also offered a way to reassess how Hobbes and others imagined the Bible as the premier text in the intellectual origins of the English Civil War. In the opening of The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), for example, Christopher Hill asked whether there were Montesquieus, Voltaires, and Diderots of the English Revolution, answering, the Bible, especially the Geneva Bible with its highly political marginal notes, came near to being a revolutionists handbook. If the question of whether the text could be blamed (or celebrated) for the dissolution of political authority seemed unanswerable, the question of precisely how the ancient text worked its way into the social fabricand how it became so readily applicable to contemporary politicsremained quite vital.

Considering this, I pursued a course of systematic reading that centered on a comparative study of Englands two dominant vernacular Bibles: the Geneva text of 1560 with its extensive notes, and the 1611 Authorized Version, whose much sparser marginal notes serve only as cross-references, short philological glosses, and alternate readings. The stark paratextual differences between these key Renaissance Bibles originate in a remarkable moment in political and bibliographic history when James I, at a conference at Hampton Court in 1604, pronounced the notes of the Geneva text to be very partial, untrue, seditious, and savoring too much, of dangerous, and traitorous conceits.modern Bible and its paratext operated as a kind of polemic or political advice manual, and, contrariwise, whether and how much the political context shaped biblical interpretation. Not only offering correctives to long-held suppositions about the contents of the annotations, my systematic reading also vastly challenged assumptions I had held about the interpretive habits the notes represent and prepared me for the present investigation into their cultural and political role. The annotations in the Geneva Bible opened a world of readings and interpretive methods quite out of step with what I had understood to be the literal approach of the Protestants, as described by reformers such as Calvin or Tyndale. The annotators of these Bibles were motivated far less than they claimed by the humanistic recovery of the historical text or meaning. In fact, their reading habits proved much more medieval, more figuratively typological, and above all more anachronistically presentist than they had been described to be.

The book that has resulted examines the process of recovery, reinterpretation, and reuse of scripture in the early modern political imagination. It focuses in particular on the literary and cultural transformations of the biblical text for political purposes. It thereby attends to Hobbes concern in Behemoth that independent scriptural reading led to the dissolution of authority by seeking to understand what role the Bible had in shaping early modern political thought. But most importantly, this study seeks to understand how, precisely, it played this role: what hermeneutic and practical procedures enabled early modern English readers to transform this supremely authoritative text for their use? How did certain imperatives in readingsuch as literalism, or whatever we might call their actual methodshape or impede this transformation? To get at the most common, most everyday form of reading, and the most immediate transition from biblical text to cultural discourse, I am drawn in particular to the apparatus surrounding the text, the interpretive paratext and marginal annotations. Naomi Tadmors